


it's a nuclear show and the stars are gone

by Measured



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Community: cottoncandy_bingo, M/M, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-30
Updated: 2013-04-30
Packaged: 2017-12-10 00:16:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/779613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Measured/pseuds/Measured
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shinji isn’t sure he knows how to be truly happy anymore, but being around Kaworu is the closest he’s come in a long time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's a nuclear show and the stars are gone

The beam of light cuts through the fog and through the dark of the night. Shinji can still taste salt in his mouth, part sea, part Kaworu. Kaworu's shirt is soaked through, but he doesn't remove it, doesn't care as he lays back on Shinji's chest. The grainy beach leaves his skin raw, but even that feels good to break the numbness he's been feeling.

Like this, Shinji almost forgets about Nerv and Evas, about god and death and everyone he's lost. He's not a hero, never has been. It's better like this, to be one of the refugees in the fallout of the end of the world. Then he can't be letting anyone down.

He's almost happy in this bubble of lies Kaworu is telling him. 

_I love you. It will be okay. The world will not end yet. I love you, I love you._

Shinji isn't sure he knows how to be truly happy anymore, but being around Kaworu is the closest he's come in a long time.

* 

Kaworu's fingers guide him through the song. He doesn't quite know, but together the melody is almost perfect. The room is a wreck, debris filled and pocked where the looters have taken it apart. They've left the piano alone, however. You can't eat a piano, though he's surprised no one has salvaged it for wood. 

The song cuts through the oppressive silence of a world without radio, without cars and largely without people. It''s airy and light, he doesn't know the lyrics, but Kaworu knows the way, so he lets him take the lead.

Each touch is gentle, something Shinji isn't used to. Kaworu's fingers leave little trails of heat on his fingers. In the wake of the song, the touches, he feels almost alive, for once.

*

Kaworu brings some food and a paperback. There's a large V on the cover, the words _Slaughterhouse-Five_ in middle between brown stripes.

"Most of the rest of the library was waterlogged, but this one survived. I think it's fate, Shinji-kun. You were meant to read this book."

Kaworu flips through the book while Shinji eats. The food is tasteless, something too stale and far gone for the other survivors to get to, but he's so hungry, he downs it like it's the most delicious thing he's ever tasted.

"How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive," Kaworu says.

A shiver runs through him. Never have words summed him up so completely. It takes Shinji a moment to realize that he's reading from the book and not simply remarking on the world. Kaworu's voice is musical, and somehow it always seems sardonic, even when he's saying _I love you, Shinji-kun._ Shinji's always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the joke beneath this.

He leans against Kaworu's chest as Kaworu reads about Billy Pilgrim, a boy lost in time. It speaks to him on a visceral level he's never felt before.

Kaworu smiles at him, his thumb slipped between the pages to keep his place.

"So it goes," he says, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

"Even the end of the world is a joke to you, isn't it?" Shinji says sharply.

"The world hasn't ended yet," Kaworu replies.

Shinji clams up, moves away from Kaworu and his comforting lies for a little while. The sea comes in and erases his footprints. He thinks of Billy Pilgrim, of a numbness so complete that time bends around it.

Kaworu keeps his distance, but watches, his hands in his pockets. He's waiting, Shinji realizes. No one has ever waited for him like this. Not the waiting of _hurry up and become something_ or _I'm waiting for you to one day stop being a failure._ A waiting of wanting, a waiting of belonging.

Shinji stays away a little longer. Just the feeling of someone wanting him is like a rough grain of sand in his chest. Rubbing against his heart, making him feel again whether he wants to or not.

*

He wakes up to the sound of waves and Kaworu breathing. Shinji counts it as a plus when his sleep is dreamless, because more often than not, he remembers a boy who had designs of saving the world, two girls who died, and a man called his father but who never was.

He's a coward through and through, just as everyone has ever told him.

Kaworu reaches out to him and Shinji bends into him, clings to him like a desperate man. He licks at the salt spray taste of his skin. Kaworu leaves marks on him. It means he wants him, wants no one else to want him. Sometimes Shinji traces those marks and reminds himself that even if Kaworu is a liar, he's the only person Shinji has ever known who wants him.

"Good morning, Shinji-kun. The world hasn't ended yet."

In the wet sand, his hands leave marks which dissolve into the waves again. The lighthouse is snuffed out now, but it will return by night. How? No one mans it, but still, its glow sweeps the dark beach every night.

"Not yet," Shinji says.

But soon, he thinks. Soon.

By now, after years of hearing the end of the world is nigh, it's almost a relief to have a finite end in sight.

*

The world is going to die, and so are they. This is a fact that no amount of Kaworu's lies can change. The lighthouse light sweeps through, and when Kaworu stands up, he's bathed in it, his expression intense and searching, stripping Shinji of all his defenses.

Sometimes it feels like they're the last ones alive on the world. When Kaworu's hand is in his, the world is breaking by degrees everywhere but where their skin touches.

"Food is getting scarce around here, Shinji-kun. Should we move on?" Kaworu asks.

"Let's stay a little while longer," Shinji says.

Through the numbness and the inevitability, these days on the beach have been some of the kindest moments he's ever known.


End file.
